Proof By Vigorouis Assertion (The Fuzzy Math of John McCain, Part 2 in an Unending Series)

The McCain campaign is being roundly derided for McCain's promise to balance the budget (see Ambinder, hilzoy, TPM, more TPM, and yet more TPM), but I think Josh Marshall's observations need to be amplified:

Now, the general routine is the face of this kind of candidate announcement is that journalists and economists look at the numbers to see if they add up. In most cases, the exercises generates fairly unsatisfying contradictory opinions, with some experts saying one thing and other experts another.

But here's the thing. McCain doesn't have any numbers. None. Not vague numbers of fuzzy math. He just says he's going to do it. Any other candidate would get laughed off the stage with that kind of nonsense or more likely reporters just wouldn't agree to give them a write up. But this is all over the place.

Quite right. This is just laughable. The McCain campaign sent out this one through a spokesperson: "It's pretty straightforward, as we win, costs will go down with a smaller footprint over time, and those savings will go to deficit reduction. It's really the logical extension of Senator McCain's position as articulated in the 2013 speech. Achieving success in Iraq would obviously lead to reduced expenditures on the effort." Well, I'm almost convinced. If only they would provide some Petraeus quality powerpoint. That would really seal the deal.

Since the McCain campaign is unwilling to provide us with numbers, let's help him out. As Barack Obama is fond of pointing out, we are spending $10-12B per month in Iraq. Let's highball it and call it $12B. Suppose that drops to zero—note that this contrary to McCain's endless quasi-occupation of Iraq, but we'll just handwave over that for now—and thus he can save $144B per year by ending the war. I see from Brad DeLong that the unified budget deficit projection is, at a minimum, $443B for the coming year. Thus, at best, ending the Iraq war will eliminate one third of the deficit. Where does McCain propose to get the rest of the savings? He doesn't. In addition, as Ambinder observes, McCain is proposing roughly $650B in tax cuts over current law; unless McCain is willing to slash Social Security and Medicare expenditures to the bone, there's simply no way for him to balance the budget in any reasonable time frame.

Try harder next time, please.

Comments

[drip]

But he's going to do it this way: "American workers and families pay their bills and balance their budgets, and I will demand the same of the government. . ." he is quoted as saying in today's New York Times. The idiocy of this of course is that very few Americans do balance their budgets. They do just what the government does; they borrow more than they can repay on non-capital expenses, using hard assets as collateral, and then take what they can't borrow out of their retirement accounts. Idiocy.

[jamie]

Slash social security and Medicare?

Perhaps McCain is planning to slash military spending?